One Shot Naruto Collection
by Srylanna
Summary: A collection of my Naruto one shots written at some point that might or might not develop into full fledged stories depending on the reviews I get about each and the inspiration. You can consider them as prologues of yet non-existent stories so please if you take time to read, take time to review. Even if you think its bad. M because of difficult topics. Done for Yorella.
1. As She Lay Dying

**First of I hope many one shots for this collection. I hope to type out next one soon.**

One Shot – Whiskey

She was flying through the forest when she heard the clock tower striking midnight. She had just left her home behind and, for the first time, nobody knew it. Ironically, it was the last time she would be leaving her home.  
She did not plan to go very far, just outside the village, to her favourite get-away; to something, someone else would call a little oasis of peace. Nevertheless, she was not at peace. She did not even remember the feeling of being at peace. That is how long it has been since she felt so. She tried to imagine that peace sometimes, to call it from her memories, but all her memories were stained. She thought that being at home would call forth that peace, but her home stopped being her home a long time ago. Sometimes she wondered when exactly it happened, when it became a home only by name. She tried to make herself believe it was when her parents passed away, but she knew she was only trying to fool herself. They had disowned her long before it happened. Her real family were not those related to her by blood for they never understood her, never even tried to. Her family were her friends, her mentors and, most of all, her teammates.  
Her elegant figure jumped from the last trees to a little clearing, just by the small creek. She sat there by the running water and refreshed herself. She was not tired that much. She simply wanted everything to be perfect that night. She wanted to be at her best for it was her last night in the world.  
Yes, Haruno Sakura had decided to end her life.  
She had it all planned, It was morbid really, she had to admit, how precisely she had planned it. Every little detail.  
She sat there, by the creek, like she had many times before, wondering what went wrong with her life, what was it that made her so unhappy.  
May believed Haruno Sakura had it all.  
She was a brilliant medic, an excellent kunoichi, a loved friend, a doted student and an adored teammate. She survived the war despite all odds. Not only did she survive, she was considered as one of the greatest war heroes.  
Nonetheless, Haruno Sakura always felt like she failed at life itself. The one thing she dedicated her life to, she failed at it. Everything she did, she did for one purpose and one purpose only. However, she would not think about that, not on her last night. She had thought about that her whole life. She would not waste her last night with the same thoughts that plagued her entire life.  
She took two things from her satchel, a scrapbook and a kunai. She left the kunai on the grass while she went through her scrapbook that contained the only photos she had left of a time before Pain destroyed Konoha.  
The first picture showed a scene she did not remember for in it she was merely a three-year-old. It was a picture with her parents. Their pride in their daughter was evident in their wide grins and the twinkling eyes in that picture. She used to love her parents, but they never understood her. She had a falling out with them when she was fifteen. They wanted her to retire from her position as a shinobi of Konoha and marry a civilian, wanted her to stop chasing a shadow she could never bring back. In retrospective, she wondered if her life would have been a happier one had she listened to them. However, she did not regret her decision. Being a shinobi was all she knew, it was what she was good at and she could not have lived her life in any other way. Her parents disowned her, naturally and she never saw them again until the day she was called forth to identify their bodies. She did not shed a tear for them and now, at the end of her life, she felt as she had wronged them by not mourning them properly, by not visiting their graves. After all, she was their only child.  
She flipped the page and a small smile crept upon her face as she saw her childhood friend and a one-time rival, Yamanaka Ino or as she was called now Akimichi Ino. To a surprise of the entire Konoha, Ino married her teammate, Choji Akimichi. Sakura was not all that surprised by her friends decision. Team Asuma was so well knit together that it was impossible not to happen since Shikamaru married someone else. Sakura did not see much of Ino in the past few years except for the occasional group get-togethers. Moreover, even at these get-togethers, Sakura felt like there was a large distance between her and her friend. They did not have much shared interests any more. Ino had a demanding job and Sakura had hers, but Ino had a family of her own she had to take care of, a beautiful little girl and an infant boy. Everybody who knew Sakura and Ino always expressed their surprise that Ino married and Sakura stayed single for they had all presumed that the opposite would happen.  
Sakura's eyes slowly drifted to the picture of two boys on the next page, Akimichi Choji and Shikamaru Nara. During the years she had trained directly under Tsunade-shishou, Shika had become a close friend of hers, someone she could lie around with and occasionally talk to. He, too, married despite his attitude that all women were troublesome. However, he was surprised that he married Temari, Gaara's sister. He told Sakura once that since all women were troublesome, he decided to marry the most troublesome one around. Sakura and Temari became close friends for a few years after her marriage, but the two of them had drifted apart too.  
She turned the page and had to laugh at the ridiculous picture of Maito Gui and Rock Lee in their spandex uniforms making a good guy pose. Surprising virtually nobody, the two never married and stayed single focusing all their time and energy into their training. They never changed in the slightest, but Lee did outgrow his infatuation with Sakura. Behind Lee and Gui, with palms hiding their faces, stood Hyuga Neji and Temari. Ino and Sakura were always certain the two would end up together sooner or later. It turned out it was sooner for they were the first of the Konoha 11 to get married.  
The next picture was the one of a boy and a very large dog. Inuzaka Kiba, much like Sakura, stayed single. He told, to anyone who dared to ask, he preferred the company of his dog, Akamaru. However, Sakura suspected it had to have something to do with that blond kunoichi that died during the war. She never pressed him to talk, though, knowing that he did not want to talk about it and fearing he might question her in return. Behind him and his dog, stood two figures. The larger one was Aburame Shino, the member of Konoha 11 she was the least familiar with. He, too, had a family now. A huge scandal shook Konoha when he decided to marry a civilian girl and his family nearly disowned him. If Tsunade-shishou had not interfered, they would have. The hunched figure next to him was the shyest girl Sakura knew, Hyuga Hinata. Her marriage was a long overdue one. She married one of Sakura's own teammates, Naruto Uzumaki or as she should have already gotten used to, Naruto Namikaze.  
She wanted to flip pages ahead to see his face, but was faced with a sight of her mentor, Tsunade-shishou. Sakura loved that woman more than she loved her birthmother. Perhaps it was a cruel thing towards the woman who gave birth to her, but she felt closer to Tsunade who understood her so much better, who taught her almost everything she knew. Her loud-mouthed mentor who drank sake excessively and had to shoulder a whole village, the Godaime Hokage was still alive and for that, Sakura was grateful every day. She almost lost her just after the last battle of the war. The moment when she was told her mentor was fighting for her life scared her so much that facing Uchiha Madara only moments before felt like nothing. Just thinking about that time made Sakura cringe in fear.  
She turned the page abruptly to escape unpleasant memories and saw a picture of Sai and Yamato-sensei, the additional members of Team Kakashi. She and Yamato were never close, but he had done a lot for her and her friends and teammates and for that, she was grateful. Although, she tended to avoid him in the past few years for he hung out with Shiranui Genma, the self-proclaimed-number-on- ladies-man of Konoha. Sakura was always red-faced in him company when he would start showering her with compliments he had used on numerous other girls. She smiled slightly as she remembered the time he tried to convince Sai to drop his nickname of Sakura, Ugly and call her Beauty instead. He failed and Sai continued to call her Ugly to that day. His social awkwardness was something that would never change. She almost never saw him either. He was now in charge of the reformed Rood division of ANBU, loyally serving Hokage.  
She flipped the last page dreading the torn picture that occupied it. It was the official picture of Team Kakashi from her genin days. Her gaze landed directly to a smiling Kakashi, her perverted sensei. She used to resent him the fact that he had focused so much on the boys neglecting her, but over the years, she had come to understand it. The boys had needed to be taken care of more than she had, they needed more than a sensei, they needed a father. Kakashi kind of adopted the boys, even if it was not for very long, and was very proud of the two, especially of Naruto. However, despite all odds, Kakashi had his own children now. Three, in fact. He married Shizune when he became the next Hokage saying she was the only one patient enough to tolerate his antics. Tsunade often said that if Shizune had not said yes, she would have forced her to marry him to keep him in line. Shizune, on the other hand, often joked that her seemingly never-ending patience came for serving Tsunade for so long. Kakashi retired a year ago thus setting the record for the shortest span a person held the Hokage title. His choice of successor surprised no one. Naruto Namikaze was always destined to hold that position and, much as she hated to admit it to his face, Sakura thought he was a damn good one. From the boy ignored by everyone, he became the man worshiped and loved by all. Sakura was very happy her friend's dream came true, but she was also a little sad for she rarely saw him. Much like the major part of Konoha 11, he also had a job and a family to balance and his little twin boys were just like their father. Sakura loved the boys but dreaded the times Naruto and Hinata asked her to babysit.  
She did not resent her friends for her loneliness. In a way, she was the one responsible for it. She should have tried harder to stay a part of their lives, but she did not. She just let herself fall out. While all of them were immersed in their families and daily lives and doted on their children every time they got together, she had nothing to say, she could not participate in those conversations. She had no children to dote upon and her job was not something she could discuss on such occasions. She loved it, but dying patients she was faced with daily were not something people generally wanted to hear about.  
She laid the book gently down on the grass and took the kunai instead. She decided for the old-fashioned way, to slit her wrists. She knew many poisons that could have done the job efficiently and painlessly, but she wanted to watch her life slip away from her. Everything else slipped away, why should her life be any different?  
She did not hesitate as she made the incisions on her wrists. She had decided and she was not about to go back on her decision. She laid the kunai on the grass and she waited. She made the perfect incisions, she was a medic after all and she knew it would take some time before she bleed out. She wanted it that way; she wanted to die slowly.  
Her gaze landed on the scrapbook next to her, still opened on the torn picture of Team Kakashi. When someone asked, she said the picture had been torn by accident, but the truth was far from it. She was the one who tore it.  
She tore him from the picture like she wanted to tear him from her life and she failed. Even as she was dying, her mind lingered on him, on the man who left her, the man she tried to kill, but could not, the man that almost killed her, the man who became a hero in the end.  
Yes, Uchiha Sasuke changed sides in the last battle of the war. He came to help her, Naruto and Kakashi kill Madara and when it was all over, when she dared to hope once again that he was going back, he left again.  
She did not choose that night as the last one on a pure whim. It was the sad anniversary of Sasuke's first defection. On that day, many years ago, Sakura had had bet her everything on the mission of bringing him back home and failed at it.  
What really hurt her was the fact that in the end, Sasuke told his goodbyes to Naruto and Kakashi. He acknowledged their efforts and thanked them, but said he wanted to live his life away from Konoha. He did not say a word to her; he probably did not even spare her a single thought. He apologized to Naruto for the times he tried to kill him, even though that was entirely out of his character, but he never spoke to her. She did not matter. She was worthless. She was pathetic. She was weak. She was annoying.  
He was not perfect either, but she loved him nonetheless. She could name more faults of his than virtues, but she loved him nonetheless. She had made a list in a futile try to get over him. He was arrogant, condescending, cold, indifferent, cruel, ruthless, brutal, cynical and unreasonable. He sometimes acted as if he was superior to everyone, but obsessed when someone proved stronger. He underestimated everyone and was so full of pride he could never admit his own mistakes. She loved him despite it all.  
While she was just a stupid fan girl, she obsessed over him for his good looks, cool attitude and the excellence he showed in academy. Once they were on the same team, she had really fallen in love for she noticed his other side. He was a caring person and protective of his teammates. He always protected her even though he called her annoying; he risked his life for them. Even when it became obvious Kakashi would always be late, he still came and waited with her and Naruto although he complained sometimes that it was boring and useless. His obsession with tomatoes never ceased to amuse her and every time she allowed herself to think about him, she wondered if he still had that weird habit. Every time she remembered that he became a good man again, she felt herself falling harder in love with him. She was falling harder every day since the first day she started to love him.  
She felt herself go numb. She was starting to feel the effects of the loss of blood. She was growing drowsier by the second. With her last efforts, she took the scrapbook and took of the cover revealing the torn part of Team Kakashi's official picture.  
She felt her eyes closing as she lied down to await her death. Her eyes were closed and she could feel the gentle breeze of the wind on her bare arms, she heard the faint rustle of leaves and grass. She felt herself getting unconscious and she could no longer feel the grass beneath her. She felt the wind getting stronger and for a moment, she thought she saw an angel before she drifted into blackness.  
Her last conscious thought was that the angel looked familiar.

**Thank you for reading. Tell me what you think of it and whether I should try and continue it.**


	2. Those Eyes

**I'm very disappointed with the females of the Narutoverse in general lately. None of them is a decent character (aside from Temari). Those up to date on manga will probably figure out what exactly caused this rant. However, it isn't just Karin. She is just like all the rest of kunoichi depicted in the manga. So, I'm dealing with it in my own way. Making at least one character a bit (just a tiny bit) smarter. I'll probably write more of these as time goes on and not only about Sakura. I just need to take time to analyse them to the same point a I did with her.**

**So, we all know what will happen once Sakura sees Sasuke. I won't even go there. That just makes me sad. However, I am hoping that at some point she will contemplate it all and realize her follies. So here she is doing exactly that. Realizing her faults and regretting them.**

**The reason why both this story and the previous one are labelled Sasuke & Sakura is because, even though Sasuke never shows up in either of them, to write about Sakura's contemplations is impossible without making Sasuke integer and large part of it. In a way, to talk about Sakura is to talk about Sasuke and Sakura. I'm not really happy about that one, but it is as it is. That is how Sakura is depicted in the manga. I am sorry if someone though it was about love and them getting together. It really isn't so you can just skip this one if that is what you are looking for. It might become that later on if I decide to turn this into a fully-fledged story, but I won't know that until I start writing. I don't really plan my stories that much in advance.  
**

* * *

Those Eyes

* * *

She contemplated her life while she was patching up yet another wounded comrade and she came to one distinct conclusion. She was just a foolish, idiotic little girl all along.

All her progress. All her supposed growth. All her knowledge. All her strength. All had been for nothing. She was still the same.

Just another foolish little girl, at his mercy at a glance of his bottomless eyes. _It didn't change._

She should have realized it before. She should have noticed how much it defined her. How it negated all her strengths, all her virtues. _Just that one, stupid magnanimous trait._

She guessed she should have seen it coming. They were all the mirror images of their tutors and after all, her tutor wasn't called a Sucker for nothing. It was only natural for her to be a Sucker too. _Just not a sucker at gambling. No, that would be too kind._

And the worst of all? She didn't even notice it until she saw another one. _Another Sucker at his side._

Where was her intellect when it came to him? Where was it hiding?

How many mistakes had she made for it? How much of her life had she wasted? How many sacrifices had she made?

_Too many, too much, too many, obviously._ Months of running after him all over the world. Three years of training to become strong, strong enough to bring him back. And before that. Years in the academy and while they were teammates.

She tried to remember a time before she saw those bottomless eyes and started falling. She was falling ever since after all.

She couldn't remember it clearly. Just vaguely. And she realized she was happier then. Happier with her best friend. A friend she had sacrificed in the name of rivalry over a boy who was her first and last infatuation.

Oh, stupidity was with her for a long time.

She had to change. She knew it. She just didn't know how. After chasing for so long, how does one really stop? How does one give up on a goal they've been chasing for so long? How does she patch herself up and move on?

_Oh, irony thou art a cruel bitch._

There she was patching up shinobi after a shinobi and she couldn't even patch herself up. She was really miserable. _Pathetic._

She moved away from one shinobi to another in the ward she had been assigned to ever since the battle ended. She didn't even bother to take in their faces. Not even of those who were conscious and tried to talk to her. She just brushed it aside. She didn't trust herself enough to talk. She feared what they might say.

Everyone knew it. The grand story of the former Team Seven, united on the battlefield at last.

_Fuck it all!_ It wasn't her reunion with anybody. _It was their reunion. Naruto's and Sasuke's. Just like the team was theirs, just like everything was about them._

She wasn't being fair. Not to Naruto at least. After all, she was the one who asked him to chase. Even after he told her he has been chasing Sasuke because Sasuke was his friend, deep down she blamed herself. In a way, it was her fault no matter what Naruto said. At least she had a right to carry that blame.

But she was so frustrated! She could never progress like she should in such tall shadows. She only progressed after both of them left her on her own.

_Irony was at its best again._

Back in her genin days, when she had heard she was going to be on the same team as her dear, precious Sasuke-kun she though it to be the happiest day of her life. She cursed that day now so maybe she did change. _But, obviously, not enough._ She was still foolish enough to care. Just not foolish enough to outright show it. She could at least pretend not to care and fail at it miserably. She was never much of a liar, anyway. Nor did she want to be. But perhaps she should be one. _Life was easier for liars._

Her body worked on its own, with little to no assistance from her mind. It was a routine to her. Check for poison. Administer antidotes. Check for injuries. Heal. Repeat. Just like a machine_. _An emotionless machine._ Wouldn't it be a blast to be a machine? To simply stop caring?_

But where would that lead her? He had tried to do that._ And look how great that turned out for everyone!_ He had hurt everyone close to him. She didn't want to hurt her friends. They were already through a world of hurt.

But she was hurting them even now no matter the fact that she didn't want to. She should have seen her best friends after the battle, Naruto and Ino. And even Lee. But she couldn't bring herself forth to do it. Naruto was finally talking to his father, she didn't want to intrude, and Ino was mourning hers. She should have been with Ino, but she couldn't force herself. She feared that Ino would try to ask questions she didn't want to be asked in an effort to distract herself. Lee was mourning his rival, his best friend and she didn't even know what to say to him.

_Pathetic. Pathetic, foolish little Sakura._ Perhaps it would have been better had she died on the battlefield too. Then she would have died honourably and wouldn't have to deal with her worthless, useless self.

She shook her head in a futile attempt to clear her mind. She shouldn't be thinking about any of that.

She should just leave it all behind. _Bury it and forget it._ She only needed the resolve to do so. To leave it all behind and invent a whole new Sakura. _One less foolish. Less worthless. Less pathetic. Less useless._

_If only it was so easy._ To reinvent one's self. She would do it if she weren't so weak. _So much at the mercy of his bottomless eyes._

Those dark, emotionless eyes that seemed to go soul-deep yet never showed the soul behind them. Did he even have a soul? Or was she just not important enough to be allowed to see it?

It was probably the later one. In the grand scheme of things, in any scheme of things, she was not only unimportant, she was worthless.

Really, she should have figured it out sooner. All the worth she had though she had was nonexistent. All the times she thought she was useful to people around her were just times she was in the way.

_Pathetic. Foolish. Worthless. Useless._ _Ladies and gentlemen, Sakura in four words._

It became a mantra in her head. Those four words and she kept repeating them as she went from one patient to the next one mechanically.

The world around her was just a blur of colours and sounds. All distorted by those four words. _Pathetic. Foolish. Worthless. Useless._

She had a feeling she forgot a word. She racked her brain for that particular word.

Her life. Just a bunch of random sequences in her mind. Just a cacophony of images, sounds, flavours, scents and touches. All spinning out of control. And those bottomless eyes haunting her through every memory, every image.

Then it all came to a stop.

_**Annoying.**_

That was the word she was looking for. _**Annoying.**_

_Pathetic. Foolish. Worthless. Useless. __**Annoying.**_

That last word seemed to ring in her head in a particular way, spoken in a voice different from her own. _A velvety baritone._

It was mocking her. Mocking her unlike anything else.

She felt dizzy suddenly.

The world seemed to be falling apart in front of her eyes.

Or, at least, her world was falling apart.

She felt her eyelids getting heavy. Her knees felt so weak.

But she had patients to take care of. She had to do her job. She had to do something. _Anything. Anything at all._ Just to have an excuse to stay away from everyone. Everyone who knew her. Everyone who knew how week she was. Everyone who knew what was behind the façade of a composed medic. Everyone who might ask questions she didn't want to answer. Questions she couldn't answer.

So she went to the next patient. And the next one. Repeating the same procedure over and over again like a finely tuned machine while those five words wrought chaos and destruction through her mind.

And then her procedure came to an abrupt halt.

There were no more patients that needed to be taken care of. She had nothing more to do.

She didn't even notice how many she had healed.

Suddenly, a wave of dizziness swept over her. Her weak knees got even weaker and she felt unstable on her feet.

She leaned against a counter trying to regain her strength, to steady herself on her feet.

But she couldn't concentrate. Her mind was in a chaotic state occupied with those five words that kept repeating like a chant faster and faster with every repetition.

_And those eyes. Oh, God, those eyes._

Her vision started to blur. Her entire body shook.

She griped the counter tightly sending a number of glass vials to shatter on the floor, to shatter like her mind and her soul were shattering inside of her. Joining the little pieces of her heart, shattered a long, long time ago.

And now those eyes were at the forefront of her mind, joined by thin, pale lips chanting those five words now all in the same velvety baritone. _**Pathetic. Foolish. Worthless. Useless. Annoying.**_

She felt like the eyes weren't just in her mind anymore. She felt like she was looking straight at them.

_A hallucination without a doubt._

And then her knees finally buckled beneath her. Her arms could no longer hold on to the counter and she fell. She fell once again.

Her eyes closing, last thing she felt, before she slipped into unconsciousness, was that she had finally stopped falling.

_Someone had caught me._

* * *

**So there it is. I hope that some of those who have read it, have enjoyed it.**

**Constructive criticism and ideas are always welcome be it in a form of review or PM.  
**

**Until the next bout of inspiration,**

**Srylanna.**


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